Age of Louis xiv
The '''Age of Louis XIV' lasted from about 1651 AD until 1702 AD. It began when Louis XIV officially came of age as king of France. It then ended on the eve of the War of Spanish Succession, the second of a series of major continental wars that began with the War of the Grand Alliance, and would continue in the War of Austrian Succession and Seven Years’ War. These upheavals would dramatically change the European balance of power, and set Britain well on the way to establishing the British Empire, the largest empire in history. In the later half of the 17th century, European politics and culture was dominated by one man, "Sun King" Louis XIV of France. Endowed with a divine right to wield absolute power, he was notorious for his aggressive approach to foreign policy, working tirelessly to expand the borders of France, and retaining much of this territory even when much of Europe was ranged against him in the War of the Grand Alliance. Meanwhile, another autocratic ruler, Peter the Great, dragged Russia kicking and screaming into Europe and transformed it into a great power through successful wars against the Ottoman Empire and Sweden. On the opposite side of the spectrum, Britain endured a second tense struggle for political power in the Glorious Revolution, from which it emerged as a Parliamentary Monarchy, rivelled only by the Dutch Republic in terms of representative government. Neither was democratic in the modern sense; barely 3% of the wealthiest British citizens were eligible to vote. Yet as the Scientific Revolution was reaching its zenith in the work of Isaac Newton, a new social movement, the Age of Enlightenment, was providing the intellectual underpinnings of the long struggle for representative democracy. History Louis XIV of France Louis XIV Bourbon (1643-1715), also known as the Sun King, ruled France during one of its most brilliant periods; his reign of 72 years is the longest of any monarch in European history. Louis succeeded his father, Louis XIII, at the tender age of four, and his minority was dominated by his mother and Cardinal Mazarin (d. 1661), a brilliant protégé of Cardinal Richelieu. The central theme of Mazarin's government was the need to maintain order against the demands of a fractious nobility whose privileges had been reduced by Richelieu, the loss of rights by the French parliament (Estates General), and popular resentment at heavy taxation to fund the Thirty Years' War. The ongoing war kept the nobles busy until the Peace of Westphalia (1648). Peace brought The Fronde (1648-53), a complicated series of interconnected rebellions, that in some respects had something in common with another great struggle against absolute power being carried on across the English channel; the French parliament was excited by the triumph of the Westminster in the English Civil War, though regicide was seen as a step decidedly too far. During the five years of the Fronde, there were three period of French civil war, distinguished by the fortunes and alignments of three men; Cardinal Mazarin, and two generals who had distinguished themselves during the Thirty Years' War, Prince de Condé and Vicomte de Turenne. In the first phase, Paris revolted demanding the calling of an assembly of the French parliament; last called in 1615. Mazarin was forced to flee the capital, along with the queen regent and the young king, but within two months Condé had besieged Paris into submission on their behalf. With Mazarin restored to power, the ambitious Condé, saviour of the situation, began intriguing against the Cardinal. In January 1650, he was arrested, provoking the second phase of the civil war. All of Mazarin's enemies united against him led by Condé's old companion in arms, Turenne. By February 1651 Mazarin had been forced to flee the country. For the next six months Condé dominated the regency, but his spell in power was brought to an end in September 1651, when Louis XIV officially came of age. With the support of the young king, Queen Anne was strong enough to drive Condé from Paris, beginning the third phase of the civil war. This time Turenne sided with the court against Condé. The two great generals finally met at the Battle of the Faubourg St. Antoine (July 1652), just outside the walls of Paris. It was a resounding victory for Turenne, and by the following spring all was calm. The Fronde failed completely. Mazarin was restored to power again, and continued to lay the foundations for an absolutist monarchy. Yet he proceeded with tact and skill, with only a few prominent rebels exiled, and none executed. All these events were witnessed by Louis, which shaped his future distrust of the nobility and of the mobs of Paris After the Fronde, Cardinal Mazarin remained the dominant figure at court, though Louis XIV had officially come-of-age. At home, Mazarin continued to build an elaborate centralised administration, with the king as his attentive pupil. Internationally, war with Spain continued after the Thirty Years' War, until brought to a satisfactory conclusion in 1658, with useful gains on the Pyrenees and Belgian frontiers. As part of the peace treaty, Louis married Maria Theresa Habsburg (d. 1683), the daughter of the Spanish king; a marriage later significant in the Spanish War of Succession. When Mazarin died in 1661, he left a kingdom at peace at home and abroad, and his own talented protégé, Jean-Baptiste Colbert (d. 1683), much as Richelieu had before. But the king would have no more of over-powerful first ministers. Louis informed the astonished Colbert and other ministers that he intended to assume all responsibility for ruling his kingdom; his minsters would be merely the king's loyal servant. It is probable that Louis never said L'État c'est moi ("I am the State"), but even if apocryphal, the statement reflects Louis' concept of his kingly role. To illustrate his status, he chose the Sun as his emblem and cultivated the image of an omniscient and infallible Sun King around whom the entire realm orbited. He seemed to have a need to dominate others; his ministers, his nobles, his clergy, his subjects and his neighbours. One of the first acts of Louis' personal rule was to arrest Nicolas Fouquet, a ministers who was ambitious to succeed Mazarin and Richelieu as first minister. Fouquet was charged with embezzlement, though he had committed no financial indiscretions that Mazarin hadn't committed before him, and Colbert wouldn't after him. The crown also seized Fouquet's superb chateau of Vaux-le-Vicomte near Melun, built over the last five years with Louis Le Vau as the architect, Charles Le Brun designing the interiors, and André Le Nôtre in charge of the spectacular gardens. Louis was so impressed that he employed the same men to create an architectural symbol of absolute rule at Versailles, 25-miles south-west of Paris. The former hunting-lodge was transformed into one of the largest and most extravagant palaces in Europe between 1664 and '89, though sufficiently complete by 1682 to become the permanent home of the French court. The aim of Versailles was both to dazzle his high nobles into submission, and to lure them into the role of courtiers. Some 3000 courtiers lived at Versailles, jostling for the king's attention and favours in an elaborate court ritual. Every part of the king's day was a performance; getting up (the lever), eating (the couvert), going to bed (the coucher). To be allowed to watch him on any such occasion was a privilege, to sit on a chair in his presence a high honour. Those who failed to pay court were unable to gain pensions and privileges necessary to their rank. While Louis himself was unmistakably the centre of attention at the French court, he also had a keen interest in theatre and dance. He was fortunate in being able to call on France's three greatest dramatists, all working during his reign; Pierre Corneille, Jean Racine, and Molière. Moreover, Louis founded the national ballet company, the Académie Royale de Danse (1661), and national opera company, the Paris Opera (1669). While the nobles spent the majority of the year at Versailles, Louis set about reforming France according to his own vision. In the 17th century, France was at the forefront of scientific developments in Europe. To encourage and protect this spirit of scientific innovation, the French Academy of Sciences (1666) and Paris Observatory (1672) were founded. With the help of Colbert, France's disorganized system of taxation was made more efficient, and formerly haphazard borrowing practices were improved. Colbert also carried out wide-ranging reforms to strengthen France through commerce and trade, based on the prevailing economic orthodoxy of mercantilism. The mercantile theory states that countries grow rich by becoming economically self-sufficient thus importing little, while constantly seeking opportunities for selling surplus manufactured goods to other countries. Industries and inventors were encouraged, such as the Lyon silk producers, and the Gobelins workshop, a producer of luxury furniture and tapestries. Artisans from across Europe were also invited to France, such as Venetian glassmakers, Swedish ironworkers, and Dutch shipbuilders. For this same purpose Colbert improved internal transport, with major undertakings such as the Canal du Midi, linking Toulouse to the Mediterranean. He also established colonial enterprises to ensure a supply of raw materials, and erected tariff barriers against foreign imports. But any long-term benefits from Colbert's efforts were somewhat undermined by Louis' policy on religion. The king's determination to have his own way in all things, made him incapable of tolerating the Huguenots (Protestants) in France. As often with minority groups, the Huguenots tend to be hard-working and had prospered economically since the French Wars of Religion left them with only their freedom of worship. Their success made the Catholic clergy even more eager to suppress them. Louis began discriminating against Protestants from the 1660s, by excluding them from office, constraining the meeting of synods, banning outdoor preachers, and closing churches outside the areas stipulated in the Edict of Nantes (1598). When this failed to effect their conversion, less subtle methods were adopted in the 1680s. Troops were garrisoned in Huguenot villages with orders to cause as much mayhem as they liked to their heretical hosts. This finally prompted a steady stream of conversion to Catholicism, and in 1685 Louis officially revoked the Edict of Nantes. He claimed there were now so few Huguenots that these privileges were redundant, but events proved the king dramatically wrong in his assessment. With Protestantism now effectively illegal in France, some 200,000 French citizens emigrated rather than deny their beliefs. These included many skilled merchants, craftsmen, and industrialists whose departure only benefited the places where they chose to settle, such as England, the Dutch Netherlands, Brandenburg-Prussia and the American colonies. To be clear, Louis' thinking was the prevailing contemporary view in Europe to assure socio-political stability, epitomized by the phrase, “''he who governs the territory, decides its religion''”. Even in the Dutch Netherlands, perhaps the most religiously tolerant country of the times, the Catholic minority took pains not to draw attention; their churches were designed to look like ordinary townhouses from the outside. At the same time, Louis had no intention of now submitting to the authority of the Pope: French bishops could not appeal to the Pope, or even leave the country, without royal approval; and all papal regulations without royal assent were invalid in France. Louis XIV was notorious for his aggressive expansionist foreign policy. He was fortunate in being able to call on the services on a number of exceptional general, among them Sébastien de Vauban (d. 1707), the foremost military engineer of the age. Vauban built or redesigned some 160 fortresses, but his most significant contribution was tactics for breaching an enemy's stronghold, which remained in use until the early 20th century. In 1667, Louis launched the first of his four wars; the War of Devolution (1667–68) against Spanish Belgium. He deemed Belgium his wife's rightful inheritance on the death her father, Philip IV of Spain (d. 1665). Maria Theresa had renounced all claims to Spanish territory on her marriage, but Louis nullified this agreement using the pretext that the Spanish had failure to pay the entire dowry. With Spain preoccupied by the Portuguese War of Independence (1640-68), the French easily overran western Belgium. However, shocked by the rapid French success, the Dutch Netherlands put aside their differences with England and, when joined by Sweden, formed the anti-French Triple Alliance (1668). Faced with the threat of an escalation, Louis reluctantly made peace, relinquishing some of his gains in the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1668). This unsatisfactory outcome left Louis feeling betrayed by the Dutch, after-all the French had aided them for decades during the Dutch War of Independence. He spent the next few years isolating the Dutch internationally, by forming alliances with England and Sweden, along with two German princes, and then launching the Franco-Dutch War (1672-78). Louis mobilised almost 200,000 men who rapidly invaded and occupied of much of the Netherlands, including Utrecht. Amsterdam was only saved by the desperate Dutch manoeuvre of breaching the dykes and flooding the plain to halt the French advance. An attempted Anglo-French naval invasion was only barely repelled in three desperate naval battles under command of Admiral Michiel de Ruyter. In Dutch history, 1672 is called the Rampjaar ("disaster year"), and as people panicked there was a bloody coup that brought William of Orange to power. He spent the next few years building another anti-French alliance including Spain, Habsburg Austria, Brandenburg-Prussia, Denmark, and a treaty with England, that resulted in its withdrawal from the war and the marriage of William to Princess Mary; a wedding later significant in the English Glorious Revolution. Despite these diplomatic reverses, the French armies still held significant advantages over their opponents; a unified command and strategy, talented generals like Vauban, Turenne, Condé and Luxembourg, and vastly superior logistics. The war continued on many fronts with considerable French success, until exhaustion prompted Louis to sue for peace. The Treaty of Nijmegen (1678) was generally settled in France's favour, gaining further territory in Spanish Belgium, while the Dutch retained their independence. During the 1680s, Louis XIV was at the height of his power and influence in Europe. French expansionism continued in piecemeal fashion, often using quasi-legal means to annex disputed cities and territory along its frontiers. The formation of the first coherent European response to French aggression was prompted by Louis' decision to cross the Rhine in later 1688, with designs on extending his influence in Cologne and the Rhineland-Palatinate. Habsburg Austria and other German princes resolved to resist, forming the Grand Alliance which eventually included England, Scotland, the Dutch Netherlands, Austria, Bavaria, Prussia, Spain, Savoy (centred in Turin north-western Italy), and Portugal. Despite facing opposition encompassing most of Europe, the War of the Grand Alliance (1688–97) generally proceeded favorably for France at first. Louis was aided by the fact the allies were preoccupied with other issues; imperial Germany was fighting the Ottoman Turks in the east, the Dutch Netherlands was financially exhausted, and England was distracted by troubles in Ireland in the wake of the Glorious Revolution. The main fighting took place around France's borders in Spanish Belgium, the Rhinelands, north-western Italy, and Catalonia in Spain, where the French accumulated a string of victories, though none were decisive. A naval stalemate also ensued, with French victories at the Battle of Beachy Head (July 1690) and Torroella (May 1694), offset by Allied victory at the Battle of Barfleur-La Hougue (June 1692). With both sides financially exhausted, the war eventually ended with the Treaty of Ryswick (1697). In some respects, the treaty appears a diplomatic defeat for Louis, who surrendered most of his recent territorial gains east of the Rhine and in Catalonia. He did in fact fulfill many of his aims: gaining permanent sovereignty of Lorraine, creating the Rhine as a more defensible frontier with Germany; and dividing his enemies by manipulating rivalries among the anti-French alliance. In any case, peace in 1697 was desirable to Louis, conserving his strength for the struggle over a much more important European issue; the War of Spanish Succession. By his death in 1715, a few days before his 77 birthday, Louis XIV had left an indelible mark on France and Europe. Even with several great alliances opposing him, he centralised the government of France, built an colonial empire, and transformed his country into the dominant continental power. European princes began to imitate France in everything from taste in art, food, fashion, and deportment; many even took official mistresses simply because it was done at Versailles, while the French language became the lingua franca for the entire European elite as far away as Russia. Europe of the Enlightenment look to Louis' reign as the archetype of an enlightened absolute monarch. While he created a France that was stronger than ever before, some historians argue that Louis unknowingly laid the foundation of the social upheaval culminating in the French Revolution. Louis never once called the French parliament (Estates General) throughout his long reign, creating a stark divide between the political elites and the common people of Paris, with the king and nobility isolated in Versailles. Moreover, one method that Louis used to raise funds for his wars was by selling noble titles; the so-called Robe Nobility, as opposed to the older Sword Nobility. On the eve of the revolution, France had somewhere in the region of 260,000 nobles, who were largely exempt from taxation and putting a heavy burden on the common people. Yet these difficulties occurring almost 80 years after his death were unforeseeable to Louis. If the measure of monarch is the scale of his ambition, then he was truly a kingly colossus. After 72 years on the throne, he was succeeded by his five-year-old great-grandson, Louis XV Bourbon. The Glorious Revolution in England With the restoration of the monarchy, Charles II Stuart (1660-85) proved a refreshing change from the straight-laced Oliver Cromwell. His manner was light and easy, his court was decadent and cheerful, and his personal life debauched; he had at least a dozen illegitimate children by seven different mistresses, most famously Nell Gwyn, a former orange seller and actress. Theatres reopened as Puritanism lost momentum, and bawdy comedies became a popular genre. In a way, the sense of a new beginning was strengthened by the destruction of the capital. Ever since the Black Death there had been regular recurrences of the plague in European cities. In 1665, a severe outbreak struck London, and killed about 20% of the city's population. Then the next year, after a hot and dry summer what later became known as the Great Fire of London started in a bakehouse on Pudding Lane. Fed by wood and fuel stockpiled for the coming winter, and spread by strong winds, the fire consumed some 13,200 houses and 87 churches over the course of four days. Charles famously took personal charge of firefighting in the streets, winning plaudits for his decisive action. Christopher Wren was appointed principal architect for rebuilding the capital. In an extraordinary effort by a single architect, Wren designed 36 guildhalls and 52 churches, including what is regarded as his masterpiece, St Paul's Cathedral with its distinctive dome, and the tall Monument commemorating the fire itself. Private citizens could rebuild their own houses and shops according to the old street-plan, and narrow streets of medieval London regrew from the ashes with more brick and less wood. Meanwhile the public blamed Catholic conspirators for the fire, and one Frenchman, Robert Hubert, was hanged for his part in the non-existent plot; he hadn't even been in London when the fire happened. There was a pathological fear of Papists; awkward, since Charles and his brother James were drawn to Catholicism from their time in exile in the French and Spanish courts. In Charles' case it remained a closely guarded secret; he was only baptized Catholic on his deathbed. But his younger brother James, duke of York, acting more from religious conviction, was less inclined to caution, though the king forced him to preserve an Anglican front. Charles II was far better at handling parliament than his father had been, but when he attempted to introduce religious tolerance for Catholics and non-conformist Protestants with the Declaration of Indulgence (1672), the English parliament forced him to withdraw it. Instead he had to accept the even more restrictive Test Act, which forced holders of public offices to swear an oath denouncing certain teachings of the Catholic Church; service in the military, and even university education were also restricted to Anglicans. James resigned from his public offices rather than take the oath, and his private faith became public knowledge; a grave concern since the king had no legitimate children, and his brother was the presumptive heir. It became an explosive issue in 1678, when an Anglican priest called Titus Oates fabricated the "Papish Plot", a supposed Catholic conspiracy to kill the king and put his brother on the throne. In the resulting hysteria 35 Catholics were accused of treason and executed before Oates was exposed as a perjurer. Even though based on fantasy, the crisis of 1678 set the political agenda for the remainder of Charles' reign, giving rise to the policy of "Exclusion"; the argument that James, though undeniably the legitimate heir to the throne, should be excluded from the succession on the grounds of his religion. The debate gave rise to the two great political parties, the Whigs and Tories (pro-Exclusion and anti-Exclusion respectively), that would dominate English politics until the mid-19th-century. But Charles, passionately committed to securing his brother's rights, contrived to calm the situation; he repeatedly dissolved parliament until public opinion decisively shifted in his favour. Despite the religious tensions of recent decades, Charles' brother succeeded to the throne peacefully as James II Stuart (1685-88); the first Catholic monarch of England since Mary I Tudor, 127 years before. However a safeguard remained. James' two daughters had been raised Protestant at the insistence of Charles II. James' conciliatory words reassured the parliament of 1685, which was decidedly royalist, and granted him emergency revenues for the first real crisis of his reign. The restoration of the monarchy had obviously not been welcomed by everyone; in the south-west Puritan feeling remained strong and suspicious, especially with a Catholic king. Soon after becoming king, James faced a rebellion in the region in support of Charles' Protestant illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth. The Monmouth’s Rebellion (1685) was a fiasco, with the local nobility refusing to sanction civil war. Monmouth was defeated and captured at the Battle of Sedgemoor (July 1685), and later executed later beheaded at the Tower of London. Determined to make an example of the rebels, 230 of his supporters were condemned to death and around 850 sentence to 10-years hard-labour in the West Indies. During the rebellion, James had used royal prerogative to dispensed with the Test Act, and appoint Catholics to positions of leadership. Afterwards, he made it clear that he intended to maintain this standing army to protect himself from further rebellions, and advocated repealing the laws against Catholics occupying the public offices of the kingdom. Unfortunately for James, as he was trying to browbeat parliament into repealing the Test Act, in France Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had protected the rights of French Protestants for nearly a century. The repression of Huguenots inflamed English public opinion. The king’s effort on behalf of Catholics was doomed; his supporters in parliament were royalist rather than pro-Catholic. National tension becomes acute during the summer of 1688. In April, James ordered a new Declaration of Indulgence be read from the pulpits of every Anglican church, freeing Catholics and non-conformist Protestants from the legal restrictions of the Test Act. When the Archbishop of Canterbury and six other bishops objected, the king tried to face down the dissent by charging them with seditious libel. It proved a public relations disaster. The seven bishops refused bail, forcing James to arrest and imprison them in the Tower of London. The fate of James was sealed in June, when his wife gave birth to a son, who would doubtless be raised Catholic. When James' only possible heirs were his two Protestant daughters, Anglicans could see his pro-Catholic policies as a temporary phenomenon, but now the nightmare was at hand of Protestant England under a Catholic dynasty. Wild rumours spread that the queen had given birth to a stillborn child, and the baby-boy was a changeling smuggled into her confinement in a bed-pan. When a court defied the king by acquitting the seven bishops two weeks later, parliament was persuaded that the time had come to take action. was married to Protestant William of Orange, head of state of the Dutch Republic; a hero to the Protestant cause on continental Europe. Seven leading members of parliament write a letter to William of Orange, husband of James' eldest daughter Mary and Protestant ruler of the Dutch Republic, inviting him to claim the English throne; Glorious Revolution (1688-89). William was naturally eager to take-up the offer; he had barely survived the Franco-Dutch War (1672-78) against Louis XIV, and was forming the Grand Alliance to call a halt to renewed French aggression, in which he needed England as an ally rather than a rival. Crossing the Channel in October 1688 was precarious, but favourable eastern winds, later dubbed the “''Protestant wind''”, kept the English fleet at anchor while Dutch ships landed unopposed at Torbay; the south-west having its own score to settle with the king. James' support began to dissolve almost immediately, with parliament, influential nobles, and Protestant army officers defecting to the invader. James II panicked, and attempted to flee the country; he was caught at Kent, but allowed to excape by William, having no desire to see James martyred. In February 1689, parliament agreed to treat James’s flight as an abdication and to offer the crown jointly to William III and Mary II (1689-1702), conditional on accepting the Bill of Rights (1689), establishing restrictions on royal prerogative. For example, the monarch could not raise a standing army unless parliament agreed, levy taxes without parliament's approval, declare war without parliamentary consent, suspend laws passed by parliament, unduly interfere with parliamentary elections, punish members for anything said during debates, require excessive bail or inflict cruel and unusual punishment. All the questions posed by the English Civil War had finally been answered, in a glorious and bloodless revolution. It would not be bloodless in Ireland and Scotland; the Williamite War in Ireland and Jacobite Risings. Jacobite Risings in Ireland and Scotland Ireland became the main battleground of the Glorious Revolution (1688), the one part of his kingdom where Catholic James II could expect enthusiastic support. When James fled from England, the earl of Tyrconnell, Lord Deputy of Ireland, remained loyal to him rather than to William III. With the active support of Louis XIV, James sailed from France in March 1689 with a small army of about 1,200 French troops; the Williamite War in Ireland (1689-91) can be viewed as part of a wider European conflict known as the War of the Grand Alliance. They landed in Kinsale near Cork, and marched to Dublin, where James was proclaimed king by an enthusiastic gathering of Irish Catholics, eagerly expecting now to recover the lands appropriated over the past century by the Protestant Plantations. Like the Irish Confederate Wars three decades before, the war divided Ireland on sectarian lines, with Irish Catholics (both Gaelic Irish and Old English) on one side, and Protestant settlers on the other. In April, James moved north to take control of Ulster, where the Protestant settlement was strongest and culminating in the Siege of Londonderry, one of the last strongholds of Protestant resistance. But the defenders closed the city gates, and they remained shut until the garrison was relieved after 105 days of slogan; their slogan of "No Surrender" would echo through the centuries. This escalating crisis brought William III himself to Ireland with a large army. There followed a year of wary and inconclusive skirmishing, until the rivals finally confronted each other at the Battle of the Boyne (June 1690). This was a battle about European, English, and Irish power struggles, and both armies were diverse; French, Dutch, Germans, Danes, English, and Irish prepared to fight. William III had the larger army - about 35,000 men to 21,000 - and adopted bolder tactics, but his victory in itself was inconclusive. His advance in the centre was relatively successful, but his cavalry charge on the flank fail, allowing the Jacobite forces to withdraw in good order. What proves politically decisive was the immediate flight of James to Dublin and soon back to France; he has gone down in Irish history as Séamus an Chaca ("James the beshitten coward"). The Irish fought on for another full year, hoping still to win two concessions. Indeed, the terms of the Treaty of Limerick (1691) that ended the war seemed vaguely promising. Like all vague promises, they were later disregarded by the victors. One specific option did have an immediate effect. There was a clause offering transport to France for any Irish rebels. Several thousand seized this opportunity, becoming collectively known as "Wild Geese". They and their descendants would provide the Irish Brigade within the French army until 1791, during the French Revolution. For William III, the Boyne and the battles that followed were important, but only in terms of securing his throne and as part of a wider European power struggle. In Ireland however, his victory marked the beginning of the Protestant Ascendancy (1691-1832). By the end of the Catholic elite in Ireland had either been wiped out, driven into exile, abandoned any resistance, or converted to Protestantism. Confiscation of property from rebels reduced Catholic land-holdings from the already low figure of 22% of Ireland to a mere 14%. Moreover, a series of draconian Penal Laws severely restricted the religious, political and economic activities of Catholics. Already banned from sitting in the Irish parliament, holding public office or serving in the army, Catholics were now banned from voting, from running schools, from buying land, from intermarriage with Protestants, from holding firearms, from attending university, or even from owning a horse worth more than £5. Perhaps the most heinously ingenious measure was the restriction on Catholic inheritance. An existing Catholic estate had to be equally subdivided between all an owner's sons, with the result that within a generation or two, Catholics had been reduced to subsistence smallholders or sold up; by 1776, Catholics owned just 5% of all land in Ireland. Protestants (Anglican English or Presbyterian Scots) controlled the bulk of the farmland, all major sectors of the Irish economy, the Irish parliament, local government, and the legal system. Ireland remained relatively calm until the end of the 18th century, when Irish antagonism toward England was re-awoken by the Europe-wide upheavals stirred by American Civil War and French Revolution. Meanwhile, James II was allowed to live in comfort on a royal estate in France until his death in 1701, but the Jacobite cause would be kept alive by his son and grandson. , but Jacobite Risings would continue for another fifty-six years mainly in the highlands of Scotland. A minor revolt there in support of James II in 1688 was easily suppressed, but was followed by the Massacre of Glencoe (February 1692), a remarkably cold-blooded slaughter, that left 78 men, women and children dead and an undying resonance in the folk memory of the Highlands. The first rising in 1715 was under James’ son the Old Pretender proved a fiasco, but the Jacobite cause remained a romantic one, passionately held. It surfaced again thirty years later in 1745, led by James’ grandson Bonnie Prince Charlie. This final and far more serious attempt met with defeat at the Battle of Culloden (April 1746). The rising was never as serious as the draconian measures taken in the aftermath to pacify of the highlands of Scotland suggest. All aspects of Highland culture were systematically and ruthlessly wiped out. The Scottish Gaelic language, the bearing of arms, the bagpipes, and the wearing of tartans were forbidden. The clans suffered forced displacement as common lands were enclosed by aristocratic estates, and clan leaders were shipped to the colonies as penal labour. In one final Irony, the song written by Louis XIV's mistress Madame de Maintenon for Jacobite cause was expropriated, and later became the British national anthem. It led to centuries of persecution and oppression; no Catholic could hold any public office anywhere in the British Isles until Catholic Emancipation in the mid-19th century. A quarter-century of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland from 1970, shows all too vividly that the dark side of the Reformation is not entirely a thing of the past. Parliamentary Monarchy in England With the reign of William III and Mary II (1689-1702), all the questions that had dogged half a century of political upheaval in Britain had been answered. The king ruled with the permission of parliament as codified in the Bill of Rights (1689); the rights of parliament in relation to the king, rather than personal freedoms and rights. England was now in effect ruled through parliament. The king still had a role but far from a commanding one: parliament's assent was required before a monarch may levy tax or raise an army in time of peace; a monarch may never suspend or dispense with any law; elections to parliament were to be freely held, speech within parliament was to be free, parliaments were to be summoned frequently; and a monarch may neither declare war nor leave the kingdom without the consent of parliament. William III had come to England to further his continental designs, but even when permission was granted to participate in the War of the Grand Alliance (1688–97) the expenditure was carefully overseen by parliament. Even the question of succession was settled by parliament with the Act of Settlement (1701), which established the principle that only a Protestant could wear the crown; since William and Mary were childless, there were fears that the exiled Stuarts may slip back onto the English throne. When William III died in 1702, he was succeeded by Mary’s sister Anne (1702-14), Queen of Great Britain. The idea of a union of the kingdoms of England and Scotland had met with little favour since James I inherited both crowns in 1603. However, Scotland had recently suffered a disastrous failure in setting up a colony in 1698 in Darien, Panama. By the time the experiment was abandoned, in 1700, it had cost £200,000 and some 2000 lives. Tariff-free access to all English and colonial markets seemed commercially a rather more attractive option. The Act of Union (1707) abolished the Scottish parliament, giving the Scots instead a proportion of the seats in the British parliament at Westminster; union with Ireland that created the United Kingdom would not occur until 1800. Meanwhile, after no less than nineteen miscarriages, Anne died childless. With all Roman Catholics excluded from the line of succession, the throne fell to the son of Anne's only Protestant cousin, Duke George of Hanover; George I Hanover (1714-27). The fact that he could barely speak a word of English mattered little, for the king was by now merely a figurehead. Britain was now a Parliamentary Monarchy, rivelled only by the Dutch Republic in terms of representative government. The struggle for control of the state was between the two main political parties that had emerged: the Tory party who identified with Anglicanism, and the Whig’s representing the landowning nobility and wealthy middle-class. Peter the Great of Imperial Russia Boris Godunov (1585-1605), who succeeded Ivan the Terrible, first as regent and then as Tsar in his own right, remained well in control of Russia despite his lack of legitimacy, until the appearance of the first so-called False Dmitry in 1604. Poland felt inclined to interfere in Russian affairs, coaching a defrocked Russian monk to pretend to be the youngest son of Ivan the Terrible and the rightful heir to the throne; the real Dmitry had in fact been exiled and died during an epileptic seizure in 1591. The pretender acquired growing support among the disaffected nobles and Cossacks, peasants who had escaped from serfdom to a nomadic life. The False Dmitry failed to convince the nobles in Moscow, but with the death of Boris Godunov in 1605 and assassination of his son two months later, Russia descended into chaos. The first supposed Dmitry was assassinated in May 1606, but the rebels produced a second Dmitry and when he was killed, a third; a scene reminiscent to the reign of Henry VII Tudor of England. The anarchy became known as the "Time of Troubles", and soon Russia's neighbours hoped to turn it to their advantage. One rebel faction invited a Polish army into Russia in 1610, and another faction invited a Swedish army. The growing crisis at last persuaded the Russian nobles to agree on a candidate for the throne. Michael Romanov, the seventeen year old great nephew of Ivan's first wife Anastasia, was brought out of hiding in a monastery, and crowned Tsar Michael I Romanov (1613-45); the Romanov dynasty would rule Russia until the Russian Revolution. The reigns of Michael and his son Alexis (1645-76) were notable chiefly for the restoration of stability, peace and prosperity, and for the expansion of Russian territory. In the west, the Ukraine was seized from Poland including Kiev. But the major expansion was in the East, where the whole of Siberia was occupied with astonishing speed. The Tsars enlisted the Cossacks for the task; fighting had become their profession, and would remain so even when they were granted land. The pattern was for Cossack bands to press into new regions of Siberia, as yet occupied only by tribes of hunters, then establish fortified settlements, and demand tribute for Moscow from the local people. Often tribute was in furs, which became a major part of Russia's trade with Europe. At the start of the Romanov era, there were Russian outposts as far as the Yenisei river, 1750 miles east of Moscow. By 1649, the Pacific coast had been reach, an advance of another 1750 miles. From the start, the Russian authorities found a secondary use for Siberia, as a place of enforced exile in appalling conditions. Some of the first to suffer this very Russian punishment were victims of Russia's own mini Reformation during the 17th century; the Schism of the Old Believers. The Russian Reformation aimed to correct Church practices wherever they had deviated over the centuries from the Byzantine Orthodox example. In our secular age, the errors seem trivial; crossing oneself with two fingers rather than three, or icons which show the holy figures in an incorrect manner. The third Romanov tsar, Peter the Great, would bring Russia to even greater heights, transforming the country into a great European power. It was under Peter the Great (1682-1725 AD), the grandson of Michael I Romanov, that Russia was dragged kicking and screaming into Europe and transformed into a great power in the European balance of power. He became Tsar of Russia at just ten years of age. With his ambitious sister Sophia acting as regent, Peter was excluded from all government business, and sent to live in the small trading town of Preobrazhenskoye. Peter was an energetic and inquisitive youth who became fascinated by the Western Europeans who came to the town to trade and by news of a wider world beyond Russia. This experience would have a profound influence on his reign. When Peter came of age in 1689, Sophia conspired to have him killed and retain power herself, but the coup d’état was betrayed, and she spent the rest of her life in a convent. Peter inherited a nation that was isolated, rejected westernisation, and was severely underdeveloped compared to the culturally prosperous European countries. In 1697, Peter personally travelled throughout Western Europe on a diplomatic mission known as the Grand Embassy. Its chief purpose was to try and build an alliance against the Ottoman Turks, but it also sought to gather information on the economic and cultural life in the advanced countries of the West. On the diplomatic front, the Grand Embassy was a failure, with Western Europe preoccupied by the impending War of the Spanish Succession. Yet Peter gained inspiration for his planned reforms to modernise Russia, and learned shipbuilding from the great naval powers of the Dutch Republic and Britain; he even personally work incognito in shipyards. Peter returned to Moscow a thoroughly Westernised man, in European clothes and unshaven. A new tax was imposed on beards to make it clear to everyone in court that they should follow his example. Women were told to appear in public in German fashions. Peter did not completely bridge the gulf between Russia and the Western countries, but he achieved considerable progress in development of the national economy and trade, education, science and culture, and foreign policy. During his reign, Peter undertook sweeping reforms that affected all areas of Russian life. Never, perhaps, has a ruler so rapidly and ruthlessly transformed a backward society. Peter abolished Russia's archaic form of government, and in its place established an effective centralised autocracy. The country was territorially divided into fifty provinces, each under a governor appointed by the Tsar, which in turn were subdivided into districts. The former council of nobles was replaced by an appointed executing ministry to coordinate the action of the various central and local organs through a viable civil service. The careers of all state servants - civil, court, military - proceeded upward in a hierarchy solely according to merit and seniority; at least in theory. To be educated was a prerequisite for service. Schools were secularised, many sons of the nobility were sent to European universities, and foreign experts recruited to educate his people about technological advancements. Peter reorganised and modernised his army using foreign advisors especially from Prussia, and for the first time in Russia, a professional navy was established. The peasants recruited earned liberation from serfdom for themselves and all their children. He also administered greater control over the reactionary Orthodox Church, replacing the patriarch of Russia with a synod of bishops so that no one rival could challenge to the Tsar’s power. He launched commercial, industrial and mining enterprises, and created a gentrified bourgeoisie population, although the vast majority of the Russian population remained illiterate serfs. Mirroring Western culture, he modernised the Russian alphabet, introduced the Julian calendar, and established the first Russian newspaper. In 1698, when the nobility rebelled against this Westernisation of Russia, the revolted was brutally suppressed; some 1,200 rebels were tortured and executed. In the aftermath, he ended the hereditary passing of high noble titles; from now on such titles were the prerogative of the Tsar in return for state service. At the beginning of Peter’s reign, Russia was territorially huge, but remained isolated from European sea trade, with no access to the Black Sea, the Caspian, or the Baltic. To win such warm water ports became the main goal of Russia's foreign policy. Peter's first military campaigns vividly demostrates the character of the man. In 1695, the Russian army besiege the Ottoman port of Azov on the Black Sea without success, but this did not discourage Peter. Over the winter, he ordered the construction of a fleet of ships at Voronezh. The next year, it sailed down the Don River, and blockaded the city into submission. To consolidate this success, the building of a large Black Sea Fleet was started. In 1700, Peter turned his attention to the Baltic, where access was blocked by Sweden, the dominant power in the region since the Thirty Years' War. Hoping to take advantage of the new Swedish king, eighteen-year-old Charles XII (1697-1718), Peter formed a great alliance, comprising Russia, Denmark-Norway, Poland, and Saxony, and launched the Great Northern War (1700–21). Despite being attacked on three fronts, the war seemed at first to give conclusive proof that Sweden fully deserves her pre-eminence in the region. Within months, Denmark-Norway were forced to withdraw from the war. Then after delivering a crushing defeat to the Russians at the Battle of Narva (November 1700), the Swedish forces were able to give their full attention to the Poland and Saxony. Over the next six years, Charles XII won a series of battles, taking Warsaw in May 1702, deposing the Polish king and imposing a puppet king in 1704, and occupying Saxony in 1706. Now only Russia remained in the war. Peter the Great had merely retired wounded in 1700, and made much of the intervening years, founding St. Petersburg in captured Swedish territory. In 1707, a Swedish army of some 40,000 men invaded Russia aiming to take Moscow and force Peter to withdraw fully from the Baltic. However, Charles XII's invasion proved no more successful than both the more famous campaigns of Napoleon Bonaparte and of Adolf Hitler. Peter's strategy was to avoid pitched battle and adopt scorched earth tactics, devastating the countryside and starving Charles XII of provisions. After the unusually cold winter of 1708-9, it was a much reduced Swedish army of some 18,000 men that faced the Russians at the Battle of Poltava (July 1709). Almost the whole Swedish army either killed or captured, Charles himself fled south to the Ottoman Turkish Empire, who share his hostility to the Russians. When the Turks refused to hand over Charles XII, Peter the Great invaded, but the campaign proved a disaster and in 1711 the two agreed a peace treaty in which Azov was returned to the Ottomans. The Russians had more success in the Baltic, bringing Denmark and Saxony back into the war, removing the Swedish puppet king of Poland, and persuading Prussia and Hanover to join the war. Together they began capturing Swedish territory on the Baltic coast from Germany to Finland. Charles XII eventually returned to Sweden and had some limited success against the growing anti-Swedish coalition until his death in 1718. With his death, separate peace treaties with the belligerents brought the war to an end. The final terms were a disaster for Sweden, losing ceding almost all her possessions on the southern coast of the Baltic, and cementing the end of Sweden as a power in Europe. Peter the Great obtained the east Baltic coast from Vyborg to Riga around St. Petersburg, and Russia became the dominant power in the Baltic. In celebration of his triumphs, Peter’s title was changed from Tsar to that of Emperor of all the Russians. Even before the peace treaty had been signed, Russia's capital had been moved from Moscow to St. Petersburg on the Neva River, with Peter declaring it Russia's "window to the West." Under Peter the Great, Russia became a new great power in the European balance of power. While he proved to be an effective autocratic rule, Peter could also be cruel. His most pathetic victim was his eldest son and heir, Alexei. The conservative and scholarly young man was the polar opposite of his reforming and hyperactive father. In 1716, Alexei fled the country rather than follow Peter's wishes and become a monk, thus renouncing his claim to the throne. His father eventually persuaded him to return, where he was promptly imprisoned and eventually died while being tortured into confessing to a supposed conspiracy. Thus when Peter the Great died in 1725, he was succeeded by his widow, Catherine I (1725-27). It is a remarkable fact that the Russian Empire established by Peter the Great was ruled for most of the next seventy-years by women, culminating in a German princess, who justifiably earned the moniker Catherine the Great. The Americas Soon Spain would lose two large sections of the central Caribbean to her European rivals. An English fleet invaded and captured Jamaica in 1655, and in 1664 France occupied the western half of Hispaniola; modern day Haiti. Surat remained the English headquarters on the west coast of India, until gradually eclipsed by Bombay in the 1690s; Bombay was acquired by Charles II in 1661 as part of the dowry of his Portuguese bride. Meanwhile the English were establishing secure footholds on the east coast, with Fort St George at Madras constructed between 1640 and 1644. France probably could have become the leading European colonial power in the 17th and 18th centuries. It had the largest population and wealth, the best army and for a time the strongest navy under Louis XIV. Yet with an intense preoccupation with European affairs, France pursued a spasmodic overseas policy. England, France’s ultimately successful rival, freed somewhat of such European entanglements by the English Channel pursued her overseas policy with a single-minded intensity; limiting her involvement in a string of European conflicts from the War of the Grand Alliance to the War of Spanish Succession, from the War of Austrian Succession to Seven Years’ War, while using these conflicts as pretext to disencumber her rivals of their overseas colonies. By the early 1700s, the accidents of history and the facts of geography had combined to form a precarious balance of power in North Americas, between Spanish, French, and British interests. The quest for gold had brought the Spanish into Mexico. The natural direction for Spanish expansion was northwards, to the west of the Rockies, into the regions which are now New Mexico, Arizona and California. The search for the Northwest Passage had sent the French up the St Lawrence River to establish a vigorous royal province in Canada based largely on trade in furs. As they explored through and around the Great Lakes, they began also to move down the Mississippi and its many tributaries running south. By 1682, the French had reached the mouth of the great river, claiming the region as Louisiana, in honour of Louis XIV; it was some time before the region becomes a desirable colony but by 1718 New Orleans was founded. Meanwhile, the British enjoyed a fertile eastern coastal fringe, neatly confined by the Appalachian Mountains, in a string of eventually thirteen colonies; the last Georgia was settled in 1733 AD. The economy of northern colonies was based on exporting fish, but soon began to focus on crafts and trade. The wealthiest middle colonies grew wheat, barley, oats, rye, and corn. And the southern colonies mainly grew tobacco, indigo and rice. From the start the import of African slaves was predominantly in the south. The colonies were deemed by Britain as existing largely for the benefit of the mother country, another future source of antagonism. Although British colonies, they were highly diverse with many German and Dutch settlers as well as French Huguenots and other radical Christian groups. Each colony had a slightly different governmental structure, but typically a governor appointed from London, who relied upon a locally elected parliament to vote taxes and make laws. Each of the three colonial groups engaged in their own periodic conflict with the original occupants of the land, the Native American Indians. The biggest of these clashes were King Philip's War (1675–78) and the Yamasee War (1715–17). For the first two centuries of colonisation, direct conflict between the Spanish, French, and British were relatively rare, and little more than skirmishes often at sea. There seemed to be room for all. This changed after 1689, when Britain and France were almost constantly at war with each other in Europe; starting with the War of the Grand Alliance (1688–97), and continuing with the War of Spanish Succession (1702-15), and War of Austrian Succession (1740-48). This was inevitably reflected in relationships between their neighbouring American colonies. Yet a more direct cause for conflict derived from overlapping interests in the Ohio valley, west of the Appalachians. For the French the region was their earliest route to the south. For the British it was the first region available for expansion beyond the Appalachians. Steadily encroachment by English colonists in this dangerous area of friction would eventually spark the French and Indian War (1754-63). The close proximity of Spanish, French and British fleets in the Caribbean, meant that the region was one of Europe's most regular theatres of war. The inner islands of the Spanish West Indies survived as part of the broader economy of Spanish America, both as gathering points and staging posts for the fleets bringing goods from Spain and taking back the wealth of Mexico and Peru. By contrast the English and French settlements on the islands of the eastern Caribbean need to rely on agriculture, where the most profitable produce was sugar, grown on large estates and cultivated by slave labour. The smaller islands would frequently change hands between France and Britain throughout the 18th century, in an ongoing conflict which reached a peak in the 1790s during the French Revolutionary Wars (1792-1802). In contrast, South America would remain relatively tranquil, where Spanish and Portuguese colonies had few regions of overlapping interest, and the French, British, and Dutch settlements were economically fairly trivial. One development was the discovery of gold near Sao Paulo in Portuguese Brazil in 1695, with diamond found in large quantities in the same region in the 1720s. This sparked the first gold rush in the history of the Americas, with prospectors swarm the region, and underpinning Brazil's economy for much of the 18th century. By the time diamonds were also discovered in large quantities in the same region in 1729, the centre of gravity in Brazil had moved distinctly to the south; the capital would move from Bahia in the north to Rio de Janeiro in 1763. Little would change in South America until the French Revolution sparked the independence movement in French Haiti in 1791, which in turn sparked the dramatic era of Latin American independence from 1809 to 1825. African Slave Trade Slavery had gradually disappeared in Western Europe by 1100 through the opposition the Church, although it remained in the Muslim lands. However, a new and disastrous chapter in the story of slavery began in about 1444 with the import of Africans, initially to exchange for prisoners in Muslim Spain. From 1500 to 1880 AD, somewhere between 10 and 12 million African slaves were forcibly moved from Africa to the Americas, as coerced labour that relied on brutality and dehumanisation. Muslim Arabs were the first to import large number Africans as slaves, where they became a particularly despised group. The Spanish and the Portuguese were the Europeans with the closest ties to the Muslim world, because there were Muslims living on the Iberian Peninsula until 1492, and they inherited these racist attitudes towards blacks. The Atlantic slave trade was originally dominated by the Portuguese, who helped define the attitudes that characterised African slavery; imagining blacks as inherently lesser. It was then dominated by the Dutch, and by the late 17th century the British. Yet it was a monstrous tragedy in which the whole of Europe participated, and to blame one group is to exonerate all the others. Europeans did not capture the slaves themselves in Africa. Instead, Africans were captured by other Africans and then traded to Europeans in exchange for goods; usually metal tools or fine textiles or guns. They were then shipped across the Atlantic in the horrendous conditions aboard slave ships, which at their largest could hold 400 people, with each slave having an average of four square feet of space. As one eye-witness testified before the British parliament in 1791, “''They had not so much room as a man in his coffin.” About 15% of those people died during the journey, and those who didn't die became property; bought and sold like any economic commodity. Where Africans went to changed over time, but roughly 48% of the total went to the Caribbean, and 41% of slaves to Brazil, and just 5% to what would become the United States. After purchase, slave owners would often brand their new possession on the cheeks, just as they would do with cattle; the term "chattel-slave" derived from the same Latin word as "cattle". Slaves did all types of work, from housework to skilled crafts work, but the vast majority worked as agricultural labourers, particularly on sugar, tobacco, and coffee plantations. The harvesting and processing of sugar was possibly the worst of these jobs, because speed was incredibly important as once cut, sugar sap can go sour within a day. This meant that slaves would often worked 48 hours straight during harvest time, working without sleep in the sweltering sugar press houses where the cane would be crushed in hand rollers and then boiled. Slaves so often caught their hands in the rollers, that their overseers kept a hatchet on hand for amputations. Living and working conditions in Brazil were particularly brutal, and the need to import slaves continued until slavery ended in the 1880s. Things were slightly better in the Caribbean and the United States, so that slave populations began increasing naturally, meaning that more slaves were born than died. Of course this meant that slave owners could sell the children of slaves, or use them to work their land. Slavery has existed, in one form or another, throughout recorded human history. The Greek philosopher Aristotle believed that some people were just naturally slaves, saying "''It is clear that there are certain people who are free, and certain people who are slaves by nature, and it is both to their advantage, and just, for them to be slaves." This idea remained popular well into the 18th century. The Bible was widely used to justify slavery, and in particular the enslavement of Africans. In Genesis, Africans were said to be the descendants of Ham, the son of Noah, who was cursed by his father, saying ”''cursed be Canaan, the lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers.” It was not until the late 18th century that the abolitionist movement gathered momentum, with the 1772 landmark case freed James Somerset, an enslaved African, from his American master, on the grounds that he had set foot in Britain. Europeans in the Far East In the late 17th-century, there existed a Dutch supremacy in the Indian Ocean, Indonesia, and the China seas. This had clearly been surpassed by the British in the last decade of the seventeenth century, though it was not to completely disappear. The Dutch retained pre-eminence in the spice trade, while the British in India conducted less glamorous trade in cotton, silk, indigo dye, saltpetre, and tea, though one which would grow in value and importance. It also changed British society, as the establishment of coffee-houses in London showed, as well as their new national beverage; as the poet William Cowper soon commemorate “''Tea; the cups that cheer but not inebriate”. From their early footholds, the rise of British power in India was very gradual, and not easy as defeat against the Moghul Empire in Child's War (1686-90) showed. Thereafter, the East India Company did not wish to fight if it could avoid it. In India the main rival of the British was not the Dutch, but the new player France after her acquisition of Pondicherry in 1673. The situation in India dramatically changed with the collapse of the Moghul Empire after the death of Emperor Aurungzeb in 1707. In retrospect it seems remarkable that both British and French took so long to take advantage. For both, trade remained their main purpose, until the British were moved by hostility to the French during the Seven Years’ War (1756-73) to intervene. The English had few qualms about conflict with the her fellow Protestant neighbour, and between 1652 and '89 fought a series of wars with little pretext other than commercial advantage. When an English fleet arrives in New Amsterdam in 1664, the Dutch governor accepted the reality of the situation and surrenders the territory without a shot being fired. It was renamed New York after the brother of Charles II, the Duke of York, and coastal regions further south recently settled by the Dutch was named New Jersey. Further north, the French founded Quebec in 1608. However, in contrast the English colonies, their main focus was not farming but fur-trapping, especially beaver, which was done through alliances with local Indian tribes. Thus New France quickly covered an immense area, but the population only grew slowly; by 1635 the settlers in Quebec numbered fewer than 100. Montreal was founded in 1648, but still by 1660 there were about 2,300 Frenchmen in North America, when the English colonies were reaching 75,000. Late Scientific Revolution The Scientific Revolution achieved its capstone in the seminal works of English physicist and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton (d. 1726). During the seventeenth century, mathematics experienced a great deal of progress in the development of algebra, trigonometry, and advanced geometry, much of it undertaken by the multi-skilled Frenchmen Rene Descartes (d. 1650). As a professor at Cambridge, Newton's first major public scientific contribution was designing and constructing a reflecting telescope in 1668. It was during an 18-month hiatus when the university was closed between 1665 and 1667 due to an outbreak of plague, that Newton began exploring the theories of motion and gravity, supposedly after an apple fell and hit him on the head. In 1687, Newton published Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, most often known as Principia. In it he integrated Kepler's laws of planetary motion and Galileo's forays into the laws of gravity, into a comprehensive understanding of the organization of the universe according to the law of universal motion: a stationary body will stay stationary unless an external force is applied to it; force is equal to mass times acceleration, and a change in motion is proportional to the force applied; and for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. It is commonly considered the single most influential book on physics and possibly all of science, and its publication immediately raised Newton to international prominence. Newton’s three basic laws of motion outlined in Principia helped him arrive at his theory of universal gravity: that two objects attract each other with a force of gravitational attraction that’s proportional to their masses, and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between their centers. These laws helped explain not only how the planets are kept in orbit by the pull of the sun’s gravity, but the elliptical orbits of the planets, how the moon revolves around Earth, to calculate the mass of each planet, calculate the flattening of the Earth at the poles and the bulge at the equator, and how the gravitational pull of the sun and moon create the Earth’s tides. He also developed the mathematical fields of classical mechanics and calculus. Newton's works are seen as the key which unlocked the mysteries of the universe. Other scientific fields were also making great leaps forward: The Sceptical Chymist (1661) by Irishman Robert Boyle (d. 1691) laid the foundation of modern chemistry; Opticks (1704) also by Newton advanced the field of optics; advances were made in electricity by Otto von Guericke (d. 1668) and Thomas Browne (1682); and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (d. 1723) constructed powerful single lens microscopes, opening up the micro-world of biology. Meanwhile in medicine, following breakthrough work of William Harvey (d. 1657) in the understanding of the human body, important experiments were taking place in blood transfusion and inoculation. Herman Boerhaave (d. 1738) introduced the quantitative approach into medicine, and is regarded as the founder of the modern academic hospital; he is sometimes called the Dutch Hippocrates. Science was also producing practical applications, such as the mercury barometer, pocket watch, and the steam pump. Meanwhile, just as the Renaissance and Reformation helped inspire the Scientific Revolution, so the Scientific Revolution would influence the intellectual social movement known as the Age of Enlightenment. The experiments of Santorio Santorio (d. 1636) also laid the groundwork for the study of metabolism and chemical processes of the human body. The invention of the vacuum pump paved the way for the experiments of Irishman Robert Boyle (d. 1691) and Englishman Robert Hooke (d. 1703) into the nature of vacuum and air, demonstrating that only part of the air was used in respiration and combustion; they are credited credit as the discoverers of oxygen. Boyle also worked extensively in chemistry, debunking the Aristotelian view of the four elements, and contributed greatly to the study of the atoms and molecules, though many of his ideas were flawed. Age of Enlightenment The Age of Enlightenment (1650-1800) was a sprawling intellectual, philosophical, and social movement that spread through Europe and the European Colonial world, and ultimately provided the intellectual underpinnings of American War of Independence, the French Revolution, and the wave of turmoil that followed them in Europe and the world. The most obvious spark that caused the Enlightenment was the horribly destructive Thirty Years’ War (1618-48), which compelled German writers such as Hugo Grotius (d. 1645) and John Comenius (d. 1670) to pen harsh criticisms regarding nationalism and warfare. Another obvious root was 17th-century Britain which endured a pair of tense struggles for political power; the English Civil War (1642-51) and Glorious Revolution (1688-89). Building on the works of Francis Bacon (d. 1626) and René Descartes (d. 1650) who argued that the way to truth lay in the successful application of human reason to any question, the British Enlightenment produced a pair of sharply contrasting major philosophers. Thomas Hobbes (d. 1679) who argued that human nature is inherently selfish and savage, therefore a single absolute ruler is best to lead the nation on a stable and prosperous course. On the opposite side of the spectrum, John Locke (d. 1704) puts forth his optimistic idea that man’s mind is a blank slate and can subsequently learn and improve through conscious effort, rather than some kind of innate ability. His political theory of government by the consent of the governed, and essays on religious tolerance, proved more influential in the long run, and provided the philosophical toolkit for the Enlightenment’s major advances. Although the first major figures of the Enlightenment came from Germany and Britain, the movement truly exploded in France, which became a hotbed of political and intellectual thought in the 1700s. The roots of this French Enlightenment lay largely in resentment over the decadence of the French monarchy under “''Sun King''” Louis XIV (reigned 1643–1715). Wealthy intellectual elites began to gather regularly in Parisian coffeehouses, and complain about the state of their country. These gatherings only grew in popularity after the death of Louis XIV, when the far less competent Louis XV took over. Gradually, idle whining turned into constructive political thought. Locke's theories figured prominently in the works of the later giants of the High Enlightenment political philosophy: Voltaire (d. 1778), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (d. 1778), and Immanuel Kant (d. 1804). These Enlightenment minds would advance the ideals of natural rights beyond the authority of any government to dismiss, the separation of church and state, the separation of powers in a government, individual liberty and religious tolerance, the social contract between government and the people, and the constitutional form of government. These concepts were most obviously and enthusiastically adopted by the authors of the United States Constitution. Category:Historical Periods